Something's Gotta Give

God... to you I look and your gaze is as fixed as ever upon my soul. You know. Something's gotta give.

Death and I are about to part ways. I am almost at the end of my game. It's been too long and I am about to quit, for I cannot play any longer. Overthinking this, I can prolong the charade for longer, but it has to stop. It tears at my existence, and I believe it will destroy it. If I don't stop. The nightmare has to end, and soon, or I may have to write a real suicide note. But it won't get to that. Life is precious, life is whole, life is love, but my world is being torn apart from inside by garish mannerisms and dishonesty on my part. My happiness is in no one's hands and I cannot pretend it is there, so it is in my failure as a liar and my success as a son, a friend, a human being, that I will surrender my shell, my vulnerability, and I will stand alight; not on fire, but with a metaphysical fire within, burning.

God knows my way. I thus endeavor to follow it, because it is the way love comes. I am tortured by my thoughts, as one may have realised. Thoughts of envy, thoughts of being inferior, thoughts of being treated as rubbish, thoughts of inattention and lack and neglect. And anger at these, at these illusions that have so long burdened me and prevented me from reaching my truth, my Self. The sweet nothings that I had convinced myself of mean nothing, yet they pressure me into a pit where I cannot escape, save by surrendering my feelings and leaving the light within me to shine away the inexistent.

God, this is it. Love is coming.

Unmasked: My Three Faces

I play a social game. When I do, I am lying. I just became conscious of how much I do it. I'm not alone in doing it, but others doing it is totally missing the point here. In this play that stands for life, I act as a victim, as a rescuer, as well as a prosecutor. These are the three main faces of my ego. I am slightly ashamed to admit that, but I can only see that becoming aware of how I act will help me become a better person, the best me.

# Victim
"I want love. I need love. Please give it to me. I need help. I am lonely. I am sad. I am hurting. I am in pain. Please help my lonely soul. Please give me what I ask for. I don't deserve happiness. I am useless. The world is better off without me. Give me attention. Feed me. I need your sympathy. Pity me. I can't do this, do it for me. No one likes me. It's all my fault. I am an idiot. I don't see how the people around me can take my crap. I should rot. I should die."
When I wear this mask, I am the victim of the world. I act, and I feel, that the world is against me, that I am lonely and that nobody loves me. It is an unconscious way of asking for love because it acts from a place of lack. Whenever I am the victim, the role I play is one where I project an image of disappointment to those around me so that they can comfort me and desecrate that image. I desire to be loved, yet I must hurt myself, diminish who I am, to get that love? I must tear myself down before I can be built back up. The essence of the victim is the imagining and projection of a need or a lack towards someone else who can save me.

# Rescuer
"I'll help you. Call me anytime you need. I am here for you always, until the end of time. You can count on me. Anytime. You're welcome. I will always love you. You always have my back. I am here for you no matter what. I will save you! I want to be the hero. Don't kid like that, I didn't save your life. Your life is worth more than mine. I will die for you!"
This should not be confused with the true feeling of wanting to help someone. But that true feeling comes from the healing recognition that the perception of the victim is incorrect, because in truth they are not broken. So rescue in that sense is the correction of perception, the reawakening of awareness of light. That, I gladly do and will continue to do, for it is natural.
This mask is due to me wanting to help others because I can't seem to help myself with my own internal problems. It is defined, in essence, by sacrifice, which my ego feels is righteous and pure. This is a misperception. As a rescuer, I look for the pain in people, for the hurt in their own lives at my personal expense. I want to help them only because after helping them, they will somehow validate my own existence. The mask comes with glasses because they make people appear broken, needing to be fixed. In this state, I refuse to perceive my own lack and attempt to bring out others' lack so that I can fill it. But in my lack, I cannot fill nothingness with nothingness.

# Prosecutor
"Fuck you. Loser. Idiot. Bastard. You suck. You are horrendous. You don't know anything. There's smarter people out there. Dumb shit. I would be better off without you. I don't want to listen to you complaining. I don't want to know what you want to tell me. Why are you talking to me? You are annoying me! Go die!"
This mask normally comes with the emotion of anger or negativity. I feel I have been attacked, so I attack whoever back. I wear this mask lightly, because I don't pick fights with people, certainly not directly. But it is also characterised by envy and other forms of jealousy. This mask comes with an imaginary gavel, too. It reignites drama. It is used to increase my sense of superiority or make me feel less inferior. In essence, once more, it comes out of lack. A fear response is triggered so I feel the need to defend myself. The best defense is a good offence? That's probably the principle at work. I have to be the best, and to feel that way, I have to diminish the rest around me. Yet I meet resistance, unsurprisingly.

As one may have realised, none of these faces satisfy or fill the gaps they imagine. The ego never does, never will. Switching between my masks gives the illusion of progression, but it is only until I have taken them off now that I can truly see.

I am so glad, thankful and blessed that the people around me do not always play these games with me. It sort of infuriates me that I do play them, but there is only room here for forgiveness. If I stay angry, I am prosecuting myself, which turns then into a victim mindset, and later maybe into a rescuer. There is no way to stop acting unless I take off the masks. And I know I only did it because I thought it was necessary to my happiness, but I thought wrong. I think right, now. I only have one face.

I may have hurt you in the past, I am sorry. I was not myself. Realisation has come, so as I get off running life on auto-pilot, please know that I am awakening. I am going to find the light in me, and I am going to see the light in you, both of which will increase the light in both of us.

Vague Vagues

1) Live the Life You Want
Emotion. Such a thing courses through my veins under the deceptively persuasive guise of lifeblood. It surges from my aortic pump into places of other biological import and teaches them shades of shared sentiment: la tristesse, la colère, la honte, la peur, or a viable concoction consisting of any combo of the previous and the unmentioned so that, on demand, when the command center utters its instructions, the expansive plethora of feelings can dip into its colors and manifest a condition under which each organ can play in an orchestral manner. This rich culture is further enriched by long sentences, symbolic of their journey, but also of their ephemerality. That decisive punctuation mark, little in size, is a segment of finality. Its presence is telling. It is defiant and seemingly otherworldly. It ceases, it ends and as such it is feared. It is a doorknob which can, when turned, open the door for emotion to enter. In it comes. Out it goes. Personne ne comprend. Nobody. It is with this apparent caveat that I ponder emotion in vague vagues. The road behind me was paved with good intentions, with the silent hope that there would be something ahead, and voilà. I never wanted to go to hell. I forget where I came from, but I made a wrong turn somewhere I can't go back to. No loading a previously saved game.

2) Corners
Nobody looks at me. I walked on, giving in to clichés. I played my cards with subtlety as to not give away my game but I created an image for the other players to look at. Call it my poker face, sans the sexual undertone introduced by Lady Gaga, or maybe just a little of that dressing, for influence my behavior it did. This image, which glues all the players together, which builds them up when they are down, worked for a while, when thoughts could be manipulated. But things have changed and I don't have the same cards in my hands. I can't play the same way with the different circumstances. I can change my tactics, but... I want to stop playing, really. You could mistake my jeu de cartes as a metaphor for life, but I precisely mean it to be an ironic symbol for the absence of made-up rules. Language, socialisation, is all a game with apparent winners or losers. But nobody looks at me. I sometimes think of myself as a winner, walking down the street, music in my ears. When I play the loser, I walk slower, head down, to the lament of a sad song that I feel is attempting to capture my sentiment. Life is not a music video. There's nobody watching each one but the people that make them, with their stories, so it's all in their heads. No one else cares. Everybody is too concerned with their own card games . So there's really no reason to lie in the corner, hunched, seemingly protected by the two walls that join behind. There might be a singer crying and validating somebody's abandonment, but they don't know, they aren't aware. Disillusionment is not revolutionary. I wasn't going to do anything very impressive actually, but attention is something we give and receive. The balance is ever-present and unchanging. This is why nobody looks at me. I don't like to look at them and when I do, I don't always want them to look back at me because, just maybe, they might see truth in my eyes, sign/sneer, and turn away. In those eyes, I might see myself, but there would be no place for me to turn, cornered.

3) The Silence of Those Who Lie
Deception plays its part and li(n)es are cast in the waters, baiting the restlessly foolish, begging them to fall into the net and believe. Losers... they'll want to be winners later which means that there will be more losers and then we'll have a food chain. But you know, it's all fake. There's no meaning anywhere, no significance that we can point to and say "This absolutely means something." In God, we do not trust. In ourselves, we have no faith. In nothing, do we believe. In nothing, we do believe. When it's dark, we turn away, avoiding what is not there, because we think it is there. And we lie about it. We say we are strong, we are brave, we are wonderful, we are powerful, we are free. We mean something, we are more, yet we call each other less. We play with meaning like it's something when it's nothing. And while we play the game, we are silent.















Notice the irony?

Operation Cwal

Do we increase the rate of unit production like the cheat above? 'Coz you can't wait any longer... is that why you have to rush? Cheater... I'm guessing you weren't taught to play fair before? Anyway, now that the Starcraft reference has been disposed of, I present you with a more light-hearted post. I've had enough of the worrying et al. My conclusion, which I have written on this piece of paper in front of my keyboard, says "When you are led to think that things you do and that happen to you mean more than nothing, all you can do is trust." I shall gladly take my advice, because I can't wait any longer. Nope. To be driven crazy is unhelpful and time-consuming. So I press Enter and type this in.

operation cwal

And now it's enabled. This is not a Starcraft game but we can agree that it works because the subject now changes. To a memory that is related to Starcraft. Stay tuned.

Imagine me, a young boy of seven or eight or nine years, lying on my mother's side of my parents' bed. There's a small notebook in front of me, nearly untouched save for some pages ripped out of it - previous attempts at giving the book a use. My head with that brown-blonde hair is focused ahead and a bit to the left, at the computer screen. This Pentium 2/3 (I forget which) hosts the afternoon's entertainment. My brother's there, playing the game of the month, and on the screen I can see hordes of Zerglings massing across the plain into a Terran base defended only by a few feeble Marines. My brother played Terran - he liked the tanks because they dealt splash damage. I hated them because they dealt splash damage. I preferred Protoss, thanks - more yellow, happier, more interesting. From my perch I got excited at what was happening on the screen - it was only later on that I learned that excitement expressed through erratic movement was considered mental for older people. Once I reached that, I stopped doing it publicly.

Each of the three races of Starcraft had a particular technology tree, each unit having a particular name and significance in the game. The balance of this has provided many people the chance to enjoy the strategy game... which is why it is still played today, in Korea especially. Those trees... they were the ones I liked to fool around with. I was so fascinated by them that I decided to make my own race and the tree to boot. Where to start? The beginning of course - with the main command building that each game started off with. It needed a fantastic name, so it received that honour. My not being able to remember any of the specific names can suggest to you that this honour was ephemeral. I make no apologies for that, bigger and better things appeared so I must have seized them. Or lost interest. Either, or. I would spend quite a few minutes thinking up these names... which were most important to me because they introduced to the reader how cool they were (the made-up buildings, not the reader - it was never read by anyone else besides me). After the first building was named, soon followed the worker unit, then the first fighter unit, then the other buildings and then upgrades. This process lasted me hours.

I don't remember having gone past a whole page. The next time I would come to do it, my interest in my current tree would have waned and I would rip the page out and begin again with a 'better' idea. At some point I collected the big (big) grey English-Romanian dictionary and looked up a plethora of words to sophisticate my trees with. Magical. I also translated some words of buildings from the game itself. I taught some of these to my mother because she wanted to learn English and me being helpful, I endeavored to assist her. I taught her the meaning of Barracks, Hatchery, Lair and Hive. The first is the first attack unit-producing building from the Terrans, the other three, in that order, are the upgrades of the main and only unit-producing Zerg building. I chose these because the words fascinated me - I had never heard them used in spoken English, not that I was exposed to much at that early stage of my learning/absorbing the language. Suffice to say, these words did not help much with her personal language acquisition. Maybe it helped in pronunciation, just a little. She still remembers two of them, although likely not the meanings. I don't blame her.

So... fast forward, and I stopped my tree invention/creative expression; at least in that specific way. It had taken many other forms, some similar, some quite different, later on during my teenage years. Possibly, this unearths the origin of my impatience, this operation cwal. I've noted in my first job interview, when asked for my weakness, that I was impatient at times. When asked how I would improve on that - as generic as the question sounded - I may have said that I would try be more patient. Maybe I should have retyped that cheat, or just quit out of the game - that would have put things back to normal speed. This journey through time thus has been brought to you by a cheat code. Now, back to the present. I press Enter.

operation cwal

Twistedspoon

Kadabra carries one, Alakazam's got two. Abra, has none. He doesn't quite need them because if you equip Exp. Share then you can train him, and if he DOES happen to get into a battle with a wild Pokémon, then he can always teleport out of there. Then all you need to do, young trainer, is to get out of the tall grass, or out of the cave, or use an Escape Rope or Fly to your nearest Pokémon Center to revive the other members of your party.

Yes, I'm a fan. Cool wee games there (my bias expressed - there we go, this is no longer objective). Well, when I was younger I had the Gameboy Advance and I played Sapphire and I enjoyed training my little team of Mudkip (and its evolutions) and the other ones, all 'lesser' until Kyogre which I found helped me wipe the Elite Four, especially Drake, because Kyogre knew Ice Beam and against Dragon Pokémon, it was super effective :D

Twistedspoon is an interesting item that was carried by the Psychic Pokémon I mentioned at the start. For some reason, I suspect one of which may be the limited character spacing in the games, it is written as one word. A nice combination, because when I look at it now I am pleasantly reminded of my 'adventures'. You know what, the Pokémon phenomenon was a phenomenon! Back in my home country (Romania), at our school, shortly after the cartoons started, the local store started selling branded croissants which had two stickers, each being one of the 151 original Pokémon. To get the album itself, you had to buy six or seven croissants. After persuading my parents to give me money for that much, I bought the batch and got it! Of course, that meant 14 stickers too! And no duplicates, if I remember correctly. And, to top it off, I got #25 Pikachu, first, or among the first one in the class. I showed my friends, we were childishly excited. Woop! I was on my way to collecting 'em all!

The croissants seem to have been mass produced in retrospect, because I remember them tasting cheap and stale. The chocolate in the middle was too little reward for chewing through all the (unhealthy) pastry, so they went from okay to crap as more were consumed. Someone say Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. But I had to finish my collection.

Time passed, I finished it while I was still at school. Squirtle was the last one I needed. #7 had been elusive... but I managed to trade my duplicate(s) with someone to finish my collection. After that, I must've felt pretty cool finishing my sticker album! I had all 151 stickers, as well as the stickers at the back of Ash, Misty, Brock, James, Jessie, Prof. Oak, Nurse Joy, Officer Jenny...

After that achievement, which maybe lasted a day, focus shifted to something else. I still like Pokémon though. When I was at my grandmother's one year during this early fad, my friends and I got a notebook and we decided to sit down and design our own Pokémon, each with their own name (my favourite part was giving them names). We made about ten? Artistically speaking, they were not Leonardo Da Vinci's, nor any other painter's displayed at the Louvre. But they were cool, by our standards, or maybe without any standards and just mere observation. I apply the label 'cool' to them now because of my current feelings about the past. Back then though, how would I have felt? Creative :D

I played the GBA games after I arrived in New Zealand. New games are still coming out, as well as remakes of the old ones. I'll have a look at those ones too and if I want to play, I shall. It's exciting, feeling like a kid again.

It is possible to bend spoons. But Twistedspoons belong to Kadabras and Alakazams. To get the latter, you had to trade with a friend. I had no trade buddies, so I never got to Alakazam on the games. But I saw the pictures online and in the cartoons. Holding two spoons, he used psychic abilities like telekinesis during battles. The spoons acted like the focal points of his energy. My point? It is possible to bend spoons. And as the Matrix tells us, "There is no spoon."